


cagamosis/wanweird

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [6]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Falling Out of Love, everyone in this series deserved actual redemption and healing arcs, the author's complicated feelings about sasuke, unhappy endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 08:13:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17679725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: because you’re allowed to fall in love and fall apart and heal and grow and become more than what you were. because sometimes love is not enough.





	1. promises to keep (miles to go)

**Author's Note:**

> I want to start this out with a huge disclaimer. This is a set of two fic that I wrote about a year apart, and they bookend my attempts to reckon with my complicated feelings about Sasuke, about Sakura, about Sasuke and Sakura, and about the way canon ended. In my head, they're essentially mirrored pieces of writing. They aren't necessarily meant to be set in the same universe or timeline, but they can also be read as such.
> 
> Absolutely in no way were either of these meant to attack, demean or offend anyone who enjoys canon SasuSaku. I absolutely get why they're a ship that grabbed so many people by the throat and never let go. It's just that their canon development managed to brush up painfully against a lot of my own personal stuff. If you want happy, uncomplicated or even happy but complicated SasuSaku, these aren't going to be for you. So, please read with care.

“I thought you loved me?” Sasuke asks and he hates, he _hates_ , the crack in his voice, the confusion.

He doesn’t know what to make of the look Sakura gives him.

He’s never known what to make of Sakura.

“I did,” she says.

_I did_ , so easily, just like that.

She’s always been that way, so easy with her emotions, the way they crown her smiles and her eyes.

He’s never understood her, that easy vulnerability, offering up her heart again and again to a world that doesn’t care and prefers to see vulnerable girls ground down underfoot.

“What changed, then?” Sasuke demands.

His voice is angry, is pleading, is he doesn’t know.

It’s too much and he doesn’t want to ask. Doesn’t want to care.

“Why did you stop?”

Isn’t that what he wanted? For Sakura to leave him alone, to leave him be, to leave him to his destiny?

Why does he care?

Sakura smiles at him, softly and terribly and he hates that it looks like pity.

For all the ways she’s ever looked at him, it’s never been with pity.

He wants to carve the pity from her face with a blade or a jutsu or a sharp word. Anything to make it go away.

Sasuke can’t breathe for the pity. Hasn’t been able to breathe since he was eight years old and his whole world was dust.

He wants her to hurt the way he hurts.

But all she ever does is smile.

“Sasuke,” Sakura says, reaching out to touch his arm.

Sasuke flinches away, and Sakura sighs, closes her eyes for a moment, and returns her hand to her side.

“I grew up.”

Why does it sound like an accusation?

He doesn’t understand.

“How?” Sasuke demands, voice cracking.

It echoes like thunder.

“Sasuke,” Sakura says, all softness and he wants her to stop it, he wants her to be angry or hurt or gloating or anything but soft, “you don’t have to carry hurt forever. You know that, don’t you? You can put burdens down. You don’t have to let yourself drown under the weight of it all. You can move on.”

Sasuke cracks, clean through.

“You can grieve,” Sakura says.

She drops to her knees in front of him, drops to her knees with him.

Sasuke doesn’t want her touch, has never wanted her touch, but he falls into her anyway when she reaches for him.

Sakura pulls him into her, like she always has, like it’s breathing, like he isn’t a blade and she isn’t something soft for the world to break.

“I loved you, Sasuke,” she promises.

It just was never enough.

Sasuke lets the girl who loved him once pull him into herself.

She’s so soft, Sakura, and yet she holds his head up and keeps him from drowning.

He weeps.

“You can stop,” Sakura tells him as she takes him to pieces so softly. “It’s okay, Sasuke, you can stop. It’s over now. Rest. It’s okay. I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

His mother once smelled of jasmine flowers and smoke.

She bled red, he remembers, like the colour of her favourite kimono.

“The dead were never yours to carry,” Sakura says.

Sasuke weeps because there is nothing left and all he is are cracks on a porcelain vase and the afterimage of lightning on the horizon.

Sasuke weeps because his brother slaughtered their clan and called it loyalty, called it mercy and left Sasuke the rubble, told him to build a future out of it.

Sasuke weeps because the girl with her arms around him cries so easily and he has never seen her break under the weight of the world.

Sasuke weeps.

Nothing will ever be enough to heal the fracture lines in his soul.

He’d just hoped, with the hope of a child who thought that if he called for his mother loud enough she would wake up, that this soft girl with a healing touch would be enough to fix him.

Her love was never enough.

All Sasuke has ever known were ghosts.

“I loved you,” Sakura says.

Sasuke wonders how she ever learned to stop.


	2. morning light (no blessings here)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She thinks the saddest part of their quiet tragedy is that they never really were at all. They’ve only ever been the stretched out shadows of a future she once dreamed. When she looks at their wedding portrait, he is as graven as stone and her smile looks like pottery shards and the taste of rotten leaves in the air.

Sakura wakes warm, wrapped in blankets, her legs entangled with another’s.

Oh.

Oh oh _oh_.

He looks so young asleep. Like the boy she once thought she knew.

Has she seen him sleep since all those long years ago? Blades in their hands and backs to the fire, blanketed in the dark?

No.

She doesn’t think she has.

He looks so young.

Did he look this sad when he was young?

She thinks he must have.

She doesn’t remember.

All she remembers is the boy she fashioned in his image, telling herself it was love.

And it was love. Or it became love.

So much love she thought she’d die for it.

They didn’t, in the end. Die, that is.

They lived, to reach this soft dawning morning with Sasuke asleep beside her, their legs entwined as he sleeps.

She would have died for this, once.

Sakura reaches out a hand but doesn’t dare touch him.

Her fingers to his cheek might wake him.

Worse, maybe, he would disappear like so much shadow and dust.

He keeps sorrow tucked into his mouth, even in sleep.

He must have always kept it there, because she can’t remember him without it.

Sakura wants to press a kiss to the corner of his lips and take that sorrow away, draw it from him like poison until all that is left to him is smiles and soft joy.

If only that were enough.

If only a kiss were enough.

She knows better now. Knows that there is no kissing the sorrow from Sasuke’s lips.

She’s tried and tried and tried.

She loved him. So much that she thought she’d die for it. But as she looks at this ghost of a sleeping boy she once thought she knew, all Sakura can taste is grief on her tongue, like shadows and dust.

She loved him once.

If only that were enough to save them.

Sakura turns away and swings her feet to the ground.

It’s cold.

She shudders.

The sun is starting to spill over the rooftops.

She stands and pulls on a robe to creep downstairs and drink a cup of tea in the kitchen as the morning breaks.

The door closes softly behind her.

She leaves her marriage bed to its shadows and dust and sorrow.

She loved him once.

It wasn’t enough.


End file.
